We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dave DeBaeremaeker. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dave below.

Dave, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

There are not a lot of resources to learn how to do toy and miniature photography. When I was first starting out there was even fewer resources available. So I tried to figure it out as best I could in the early days.

During those early days I happened to attend the Photoshop World conference in Orlando Florida. The conference didn’t have any panels directly related to miniature photography, but since I dabble in other genres I figured I’d learn… something. I wasn’t sure what, but at least I’d be entertained for a while.

If you have never been to a Photoshop World, they have many events, but the core of it are several educational tracks on things like Photoshop, creativity, fashion, landscapes etc. Attendees then pick and choose which sessions in those tracks they wish to attend. I selected the sessions that I thought I would learn something from – maybe a lighting technique, or some fancy Photoshop trick, however none of them were directly related to the small scale toys I wanted to shoot.

On the last session of the last day I looked at the available sessions and none of them really grabbed my attention. The only one that remotely caught my eye was one session put on by a car photographer named Tim Wallace. I have no particular interest in cars, and I liked to shoot little things, not big things, but Tim was British as are many of my favorite actors, and I liked the show Top Gear, so I figured it would not be a bad way to spend an hour. Besides nothing else caught my eye, so why not?

As I was listening to Tims presentation, which was full of the British wit and dry sense of humor I was hoping for, he said something that fundamentally changed how I viewed the process of learning my craft. He said that cars were tricky to shoot, especially with studio lights, because they are large shiny curved objects. He then suggested that folks practice by shooting mens watches, as they are small shiny curved objects. The only real difference between the two is the scale.

This set off alarm bells in my head as I realized that the toys I was shooting are also, fundamentally, small shiny curved objects. I realized that this session, that I attended as a lark and expected to get nothing from was actually chalk full of incredibly useful information that, while not directly about shooting miniatures, was full of concepts, techniques, and sage advice, that I could use to make my work better.

Then I started thinking about how some of the other sessions about lighting people, and posing models and all those photography sorts of things. I could also apply those concepts to my work as well (after all, action figures are people shaped, just smaller).

This epiphany is something I call “All lessons apply”. Useful information that can help me fine tune my skills as a toy photographer can come from an incredibly wide range of different sources. Indeed, over the years I have gained skills and insights about how to make better toy photogs, not only from learning from other photographers, but by many others. I’ve learned things like how to make action figures more lifelike by watching VFX artist tutorials, how to do more realistic posing of figures from comic book artists talking about how they draw comics, and how to layer light into a scene from the zen-like landscape painter, Bob Ross.

So my advice to new creatives is to not just look for knowledge from others that do the same things you do, but draw from a wide range of creative people, because everyone has something they can teach us about ourselves and our craft, and all those lessons apply.

Dave, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am many things, but the thing I want to be known first and foremost is being a miniature photographer.

To get it out of the way, other things I am are a husband, and father of two middle-school kids. I am Canadian, but have been living in North Carolina for the last 15 years or so. I work as a Site Reliability Engineer for Google, which pays my bills, and funds my art.

My art, as I mentioned is miniature photography. Basically that entails creating realistic looking, engaging photos, using small scale models, such as LEGO minifigures, action figures, DnD miniatures, and similar things. I find the act of creating imagery with miniatures to be both technically and creatively challenging, which I enjoy immensely. I have been doing this work for the past 8 or 9 years.

What I love about my work is that it allows me to tell stories. Stories I don’t have any other way of expressing. I have a big Hollywood scale imagination, but I don’t have a Hollywood scale budget. Telling these stories with models allows me to create worlds that are as big as my imagination, but still allows me to pay my mortgage.

I used to call myself a toy photographer, as the images I created were almost always entirely made using off-the-shelf toys. Over time I started getting into making my own custom props to use in these images. My office had a makerspace with 3D printers and laser cutters that I started using to create these props. During the COVID lockdown I ended up assembling all the tools I used from the office maker space in my studio. Since I had all this time on my hands I started using it to 3D print my own figures to use as the subjects of my photos. I also started creating my own dioramas as well. Since 3D printed figures are not, technically, toys, I have adopted the description of miniature photography.

While I have done some work for others, the most significant name being LEGO, I mainly create my art for myself. I have no desire to do the hard work required to make a living from my art (I would need a really good business manager if I ever decided to go that route), but the desire to create things never stops, so I create for me. My responsibility for my art ends when I export the final image from Photoshop and post it online. What happens to it after that is up to the whims and fates of the Internet.

I am a huge believer that artists should share, as much as they can, about their art. Not just their final works, but their processes for creating that art. By sharing this knowledge we all become better at our crafts, and that makes the world a more interesting place.

There are not a lot of educational resources that teach how to do miniature photography, so I was fortunate enough to record a class with KelbyOne on an Introduction To Toy Photography. I have also started a YouTube channel that showcases how I go about creating my images. This was, in part, to help share some of the knowledge that I have gained over the years with others, and provide a resource where they can learn some skills and get some inspiration, that I didn’t have when I started on this journey. Not to mention that video production has become another creative outlet for me. So if I can help spread some useful techniques and inspiration while also having a lot of fun, so much the better!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I have stumbled into a very unique genre of photography. It is not really commercially viable, and I don’t try to make money off of it. It is not classic art, fashion or lifestyle work that Instagram feeds thrive off of. I’m just a 49 year old dude sitting in my basement shooting toys and action figures. It is literally kids stuff. So what gives? Why do I do it?

The answer is that I am story teller at heart. Since I was a young kid I’ve always strived to tell stories. The thing is, I could never really get them out in any way I felt others would care about. I couldn’t draw or paint. I wasn’t a good writer. I couldn’t sing or play an instrument. All of the traditional creative outlets seemed unobtainable to me. It is something I’ve struggled with, and caused me a great deal of frustration, and affected my self esteem.

This went on until I was about 35 years old when, through sheer luck, I stumbled onto the idea of toy photography (I am by far not the first, nor only, toy photographer, but I had not heard of others doing it until well after I had started on my own journey in toy photography). I found that this genre of photography was the exact medium I needed to allow me to tell those stories I’ve been so desperate to tell.

Toy photography is also very accessible. I can’t afford to get Deadpool to come to my house, and Ryan Reynolds will not return my phone call, but with a $20 action figure I can tell all the super hero stories I want. It is complete and total creative freedom for a guy like me, with a budget like mine. It is Hollywood level story telling on a poor mans budget.

At first I was rather shy about sharing my toy photos, mainly for fear of being laughed at, or it being dismissed as being childish or foolish. However over time I realized that it is incredibly cathartic. Having the freedom to create is fantastic for my mental health, and allows me to express myself in ways I never could before. It allows me to release all the things that have been growing inside of me all these years and set them free.

So while I may never make a lot of money doing what I do, the rewards of being able to create at will far outweighs anything else I could do in this world. I have a day job to pay my bills, but I have my art to feed my soul.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn was that I didn’t need to define myself by others expectations, and that I should create art for myself first.

Despite being Gen X, I started my photography journey squarely in the world of social media. As a result I had a ton of photographers I followed, and I strived to make my work look like theres. At first that idea worked for me because I was still learning and trying to figure out who I was as a photographer. Since I could be anyone, I might as well be like the other successful photographers, right?

I also had the burden of comparing follower and like counts of my work to their work (spoiler alert: theirs was much bigger). The logical path seemed to be keep trying to get better at looking like the popular photographers, and my own follower count will increase as well. Clearly people like their work, so they should like mine as well. Seems simple enough, right?

As I grew as a photographer I started to feel hampered by trying to look like the style of others. The world wanted well exposed, sharp, clean photos. I, well, didn’t. I liked dirty, and gritty. Not to mention I was shooting stuff that no one else I knew was shooting. Not to mention every time I got a bit better, so did the people I was trying to imitate. Fitting into that mold and trying to make my work look like the trends of the day started to make me not want to shoot as much. I would get feedback that I should change things, because things were never perfect. The subject wasn’t in the right spot in the frame,, the lighting wasn’t the right type, and my horizons were not straight (crooked horizons are a mortal sin for some photographers).

There was one point, after a discussion with a mentor, that I reached a breaking point and I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to be a follower anymore, and I would make my photos look the way I wanted them to look. If what I wanted to do with my imagery didn’t please the audiences of the photographers I admired and wanted to impress, well, that became their problem, not mine. I wasn’t going to create art for their audience anymore. I was creating my own world for me to occupy, and in my world, dang it, the horizons are not always straight.

Maybe it wouldn’t make me popular, but maybe it would make me feel happier about my work.

So I blazed my own artistic path. Pretty soon I had developed my own unique style, and the quality of my work, and my happiness with it, increased dramatically. My work started to feel like my work, not a poor imitation of someone else’s. Folks now tell me that they can easily pick my work out of a crowd of photos, and that pleases me greatly. Not because I am recognized, but because I know what they are seeing is as true to me as I can make it. If they don’t happen to like it, then thats cool. That just means they are not my real audience. Not everyone is going to like my art, and thats OK. However I take great comfort in the fact that folks that do like my work are getting the authentic me, and folks that don’t are at least seeing me, and not just a poor imitation of someone else.

So create for yourself first. It is the only way to be sure what you create is authentic.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://studiodave.ca
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealstudiodave/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRealStudioDave/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/StudioDave
• Other: My Toy Photogaphy Course: https://members.kelbyone.com/course/dave-debaeremaeker-intro-to-toy-photography/

Image Credits
Dave DeBaeremaeker